Malcolm Page
The basic resources needed for the study and teaching of Canadian drama have been appearing gradually in recent years. We now have hundreds of play texts, together with periodicals, bibliographies, Stage Voices, books on the Shaw and Stratford Festivals and the Dominion Drama Festival, and a few books about particular dramatists. We sell lack, however, the overview of current writers provided for the United States by Gerald Weales in The Jumping-Off Place and for Britain in books by John Russell Taylor, John Elsom and Arnold Hinchliffe. A big gap is filled by CTR Publications with this indispensable book
The tile is Canada's Playwrights; in fact, the book includes only living playwrights, those 'who have been or still are being produced in Canada', so John Coulter, Gwen Ringwood and Herman Voaden represent the generation who began writing in the 1930s. That it is 'a biographical guide' means, I think, that the bibliographies are usually selective. The format is between 1½ pages and 4½ as Len Peterson, George Ryga and Mavor Moore, the list is complete for stage plays but selective for radio and TV work. Unfortunately addresses are left out: one of the uses of this volume should be to bring about more performances.
The editors discourage a reviewer from playing the familiar game of complaining about omissions by stating disarmingly that their book is 'only a starting point' and that their initial collection of authors was 'by a process of elimination (advice, discussion, debate, commonsense, general knowledge and a fair amount of subjectivity) brought down to 70 names. '
What they do not say is why they limited themselves to seventy. They have attempted to give something approaching fair representation to the whole country (with 12 francophone Quebec writers) and to women (17). That writing a lot is usually a condition for inclusion is the only explanation I can find for the absence of John Gray, while discrimination against less serious playwrights might account for the omission of Richard Ouzounian, And of the seven Quebec writers introduced through translations in Volume 5 A Collection of Canadian Plays (Bastet: Simon & Pierre, 1978), only Michel Garneau has an entry in Canada's Playwrights,
The editors display remarkable accuracy, though it is odd that John Lazarus is described as having acted in an unnamed 'really low budget movie', when that movie was Skip Tracer, one of the dozen-or-so best Canadian films. I regret that useful essays by the writers are omitted (James Reaney has often written well about his work), as are interviews, even when primarily biographical; for example, Margo Dunn's with Sharon Pollock in Makara, August-September 1976, pp 2-6. Also, I note seven publications of scripts that are not recorded: B.A. Cameron's Rites of Passage in an issue of Room of One's Own (3.2, 1977), and six short plays: three by Ken Gass, Ken Mitchell and Len Peterson in Quarry, No, 28, Summer 1979: Eric Nicol's The Man from Inner Space in The Play's the Thing, edited by Tony Gifford (Macmillan, 1976 ); Gwen Ringwood's The Stranger in Canadian Drama, Autumn 1979; and George Ryga's Laddie Boy in Transitions I (Commcept, 1978).
So much for quibbles and fault-finding. We all need this handbook: I hope to see an enlarged second edition soon.